"A moral earthquake has turned fractions into units, and units into ciphers. If a black man counts at all now, he counts five-fifths of a man, not three-fifths. Revolutions have no such fractions in their arithmetic; war and humanity join hands to blot them out. Four millions, therefore, and not three-fifths of four millions, are to be reckoned in here now, and all these four millions are, and are to be, we are told, unfit for political existence.
"Did the framers of the Constitution ever dream of this? Never, very clearly. Our fathers trusted to gradual and voluntary emancipation, which would go hand in hand with education and enfranchisement. They never peered into the bloody epoch when four million fetters would be at once melted off in the fires of war. They never saw such a vision as we see. Four millions, each a Caspar Hauser, long shut up in darkness, and suddenly led out into the full flash of noon, and each, we are told, too blind to walk, politically. No one foresaw such an event, and so no provision was made for it. The three-fifths rule gave the slaveholding States, over and above all their just representation, eighteen Representatives beside, by the enumeration of 1860.
"The new situation will enable those States, when relationships are resumed, to claim twenty-eight Representatives beside their just proportion. Twenty-eight votes to be cast here and in the Electoral College for those held not fit to sit as jurors, not fit to testify in court, not fit to be plaintiff in a suit, not fit to approach the ballot-box! Twenty-eight votes to be more or less controlled by those who once betrayed the Government, and for those so destitute, we are assured, of intelligent instinct as not to be fit for free agency!
"Shall all this be? Shall four million beings count four millions, in managing the affairs of the nation, who are pronounced by their fellow-beings unfit to participate in administering government in the States where they live, or in their counties, towns, or precincts; who are pronounced unworthy of the least and most paltry part in local political affairs? Shall one hundred and twenty-seven thousand white people in New York cast but one vote in this House, and have none but one voice here, while the same number of white people in Mississippi have three votes and three voices? Shall the death of slavery add two-fifths to the entire power which slavery had when slavery was living? Shall one white man have as much share in the Government as three other white men merely because he lives where blacks outnumber whites two to one? Shall this inequality exist, and exist only in favor of those who without cause drenched the land with blood and covered it with mourning? Shall such be the reward of those who did the foulest and guiltiest act which crimsons the annals of recorded time? No, sir; not if I can help it."
Two other modes of meeting the case had been considered by the committee, namely: First, To make the basis of representation in Congress and the Electoral College consist of sufficiently qualified voters alone; Second, To deprive the States of the power to disqualify or discriminate politically on account of race or color.
After presenting some reasons why the committee saw proper to recommend neither of these plans, Mr. Conkling further argued in favor of the proposed amendment: "It contains but one condition, and that rests upon a principle already imbedded in the Constitution, and as old as free government itself. That principle I affirmed in the beginning; namely, that representation does not belong to those who have not political existence, but to those who have. The object of the amendment is to enforce this truth. It therefore provides that whenever any State finds within its borders a race of beings unfit for political existence, that race shall not be represented in the Federal Government. Every State will be left free to extend or withhold the elective franchise on such terms as it pleases, and this without losing any thing in representation if the terms are impartial as to all. Qualifications of voters may be required of any kind—qualifications of intelligence, of property, or of any sort whatever, and yet no loss of representation shall thereby be suffered. But whenever in any State, and so long as a race can be found which is so low, so bad, so ignorant, so stupid, that it is deemed necessary to exclude men from the right to vote merely because they belong to that race, in that case the race shall likewise be excluded from the sum of Federal power to which the State is entitled. If a race is so vile or worthless that to belong to it is alone cause of exclusion from political action, the race is not to be counted here in Congress."
Mr. Conkling maintained that the pending proposition commended itself for many reasons. "First. It provides for representation coëxtensive with taxation. I say it provides for this; it does not certainly secure it, but it enables every State to secure it. It does not, therefore, as the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Rogers] insists, violate the rule that representation should go with taxation. If a race in any State is kept unfit to vote, and fit only to drudge, the wealth created by its work ought to be taxed. Those who profit by such a system, or such a condition of things, ought to be taxed for it. Let them build churches and school-houses, and found newspapers, as New York and other States have done, and educate their people till they are fit to vote. 'Fair play,' 'A fair day's wages for a fair day's work,' 'Live and let live'—these mottoes, if blazoned over the institutions of a State, will insure it against being cursed for any length of time with inhabitants so worthless that they are fit only for beasts of burden. I have said that the amendment provides for representation going hand in hand with taxation. That is its first feature.
"Second. It brings into the basis both sexes and all ages, and so it counteracts and avoids, as far as possible, the casual and geographical inequalities of population.
"Third. It puts every State on an equal footing in the requirement prescribed.
"Fourth. It leaves every State unfettered to enumerate all its people for representation or not, just as it pleases.